Are Our Work Lives Really Simplified Through Digitization?

Image: infocux Technologies/Flickr

Now more than ever, enterprises and small businesses alike are able to streamline communication and enhance collaboration across continents, between departments, and among individual employees. With the proliferation of collaboration systems beyond legacy email such as Jive, Salesforce Chatter, Twitter, and Yammer — as well as file share alternatives including Box, Dropbox, and Hightail — organizations are able to send a file, ask a question, or share good news with the click of a mouse (or a swipe of your finger). But is this increased digitization really simplifying our work lives?

Businesses offer a vast array of collaboration applications to their workforce, but often these systems lack integration capabilities. This creates data silos, information clutter, and content sprawl. Employees have information spread across multiple platforms without a way to connect them to one another. Is someone working on the most recent version of a document? Was their question answered by someone else in a conversation in which they weren’t included? These are just a couple of the issues you face when using multiple systems on a day-to-day basis.

In the old days, information workers achieved efficiency by carefully categorizing data through mailbox labeling and file share folder structures, filing things away as best as they could. Now, with more reliance on search as well as the promise of metadata and limitless cheap storage that can also help categorize data, information workers produce and consume data across multiple platforms in the name of expedience.

What is the end result? We’ve become enslaved to the second-by-second burst of digital moments that demand our attention. Most of us wake up with our smartphones: We immediately check email, Twitter feeds, personal social feeds, and work social feeds. Then, if we can squeeze in time for breakfast, we come to work facing additional emails, social feed updates, instant messages, and more.

In becoming enslaved to today’s reality of information overload, we’ve experienced rapid declines in attention span and a spike in workplace stress — which negatively impacts our ability to make meaningful decisions. Recent studies find an average person has an attention span of eight seconds (one second less than that of a goldfish) and checks their email inbox 30 times per hour.

According to Everest College’s 2013 Work Stress Survey, 83 percent of employed Americans are stressed out by at least one aspect of their job. Only 17 percent of participants stated that their job causes no stress. Specifically looking at IT administrators, more than 57 percent of those surveyed in another study consider switching careers because of stress on the job.

This is not to say organizations should cease using these technologies to their advantage. Employees can avoid complicating their work lives by taking a few simple actions:

Unify social feeds, email, and data access to as few platforms as possible. Less is truly more.

Resist the temptation to become a “news junkie”. Believe me, it’ll be there when you take your lunch break or go home after work.

Take the time to prioritize your day-to-day work projects. I suggest implementing “do not disturb” blocks of time while you’re working so you have time to think. In fact, some of my best colleagues use these times to process information and they’re more innovative since they can make decisions unencumbered by ancillary distractions.

So before you jump on the next latest fad and adopt a massively connected, slickly presented information gadget that will allegedly solve all your problems, ask yourself these questions:

Will this help simplify my work, or just introduce more momentary information bursts that further reduce my attention span?

Will it integrate with my existing feeds — or even replace my existing feeds — in order to make my life simpler?

Can I use this for more than three months, or will I just jump to something else?

Our lives are already complicated and busy as it is. When it comes to technology at work, spending more time thinking about how we can actually improve work is the most worthwhile investment.

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